Don’t Read Too Much Into Brown’s Victory Over Coakley

The media, mainstream and otherwise, are enthralled over former Republican State Senator Scott Brown’s victory over his Democratic rival, Massachusetts’ liberal Attorney General Martha Coakley, in securing the Senate seat vacated by the late, iconic fixture Teddy Kennedy. Unsurprisingly, the GOP is energized and the Democrats overwrought by this unexpected turn of events.

But Brown’s win is not likely to foreshadow any a sea-change in American politics. Just as President Barack Obama’s campaign promises of a new era of transparency, an end to earmarks for pet projects, and no tax increases for those earning less than $250,000, those promises turned out to be the kind of propaganda anybody with a functioning brain knew they would be, Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts will not result in a massive return to constitutional principles.

Even if Brown were totally sincere about a return to constitutional ideals — his pro-choice views and support, in theory, for increased government control over medicine notwithstanding — the problem is that America’s entrenched government bureaucracy has gone over to the dark side. It is filled to overflowing with liberal-leftists. Any career constitutionalist bureaucrat is a pariah who will not be promoted, no matter who is running the Administration. That fact is not likely to change, for a variety of reasons, among them:

Government employee unionization, which leans left;

The double-standard applied to political correctness, vis-à-vis liberals and conservatives (the difference between Harry Reid’s gaffe concerning candidate Obama’s “light skin” and lack of “Negro dialect” compared to Trent Lott’s oblique racial allusion at the late Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party is but the latest example);

Political appointees overseeing agencies and increasing staffs of liberal new-hires (as opposed to conservative appointees who commit to slowing growth and decreasing staff, thus in this case handing the liberal-left the advantage);

Ongoing conservative whine-fests, as opposed to bold, new initiatives to address the nation’s problems;

A liberal-left Governor’s Association, from which many candidates emerge and from which state counterparts to federal legislation are spawned;

Mandatory workshops for government-employees typically aimed at promoting political correctness;

A government culture that recruits and trains “change agents,” mostly aimed at ensuring a liberal-left status quo among citizens’ groups (“stakeholders”) and state and local affiliate organizations (e.g., police and sheriff’s departments, state education agencies, child protection service agencies, immigration offices, etc., all of which have counterparts in federal agencies and receive money from them);

Public education and teacher-training systems that have aggressively promoted Marxist socialism for some 40 years, coupled to the people’s failure to retain substantive knowledge that at least embodied a few key contributions and ideas that eventually led to cherished American virtues. (How many parents or teachers, for example, can recite, off the top of their head, anything noteworthy about staples of our culture that everyone once knew: philosophers Aristotle, Disraeli, Sir Thomas Hobbes and the authors of the Federalist papers; artists Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Bonnard, Manet, Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Sisley and Cézanne; or literary greats like William Makepeace Thackery, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Cicero, Emily Brontë and Honoré de Balzac, to name just a few?);

Failure of traditionalists and constitutionalists to insistently preserve American ideals in the media, coupled to the leftist media’s expansion and near-takeover of entertainment and news. (Why did we not place key constitutionalist advocates on the Boards of some of these organizations?);

Public acceptance of appeasement and non-confrontation across-the-board (also known as “working within the system,” even when it’s rotten); and,

Ignorance concerning the elements of real debate (most people believe debate to be a contest of memorized note-cards, bereft of any technique or understanding).

It is obviously a little late to recapture any of the above, much less re-institutionalize those things that were once considered part and parcel of “the public welfare,” political appointments being just one part.

Yes, there are pockets here and there of good sense and real intellectual prowess, a few examples being found among the Tea-Partiers, homeschoolers and readers of this Website.

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